


fireflies on the porch

by megaera (songaboutlove)



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, bea-centric fic because :( i love her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 05:11:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21131204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songaboutlove/pseuds/megaera
Summary: There’s a lot of things that Bea wants. Things that she can’t really articulate or make sense of.





	fireflies on the porch

Angus shows up unexpectedly at the Ol’ Pickaxe one morning. Bea is sitting behind the counter with her feet up on it, lighter already halfway to the unlit cigarette in her mouth. She tries her best to push aside the compulsion to smoke at work every morning. So far she’s never made it past 10 AM.

Anyway, Angus just walks in like it’s no big deal, as though they’re the kinds of friends who do shit like that. Bea pauses, looks directly at Angus like she’s never seen him before.

“What do you want?”

“Did you hear what happened to Casey?” Angus says.

Bea stares at him blankly. “Who?”

“Casey Hartley,” Angus says. “We went to high school with him.”

It takes her a moment to pick out Casey Hartley from the blurry mass of faces that her high school classmates have all melted into since they graduated. “Oh, yeah. What happened to him?”

“He’s missing,” Angus says. “Jeez, don’t tell me you haven’t seen the posters. I’m pretty sure there’s one outside your store.”

“Guess I just don’t pay attention to that kinda stuff,” Bea says, shrugging and really wishing the cigarette between her lips was lit. “What are you tellin’ me for?”

Angus clenches his jaw. It’s a small movement but Bea notices it. They’ve been friends a long time, after all – not the _walk-into-each-other’s-place-of-work-to-chat_ kind of friends, sure, but still – Bea knows Angus a lot better than she cares to admit.

“Gregg’s really upset about it,” he says. “He and Casey were close, so I… he was part of our band, see.”

“Oh, your _band,” _Bea says, and the not-so-light condescension in her tone makes Angus frown. It makes her feel a little bad. It usually doesn’t.

“Yes, our _band,” _he replies. “And I’ve been trying to comfort Gregg, but he’s… he’s having a hard time. Casey’s missing, and we don’t have a bass player anymore, and… it’s not much of a band with just two people.”

Bea just looks at him. She has a pretty good idea of what he’s going to say, but she wants him to say it. “So?”

Angus sighs, runs a hand through his hair. It occurs to Bea that she’s never seen him this frazzled before. He’s always been quiet, subdued, put-together – it used to annoy her, but now she figures he must have a pretty good reason for staying so stoic all the time. She knows she certainly does.

“Will you join our band?” he says finally, staring at the cigarette in her mouth and not her. “I know you think playing instruments is stupid, but I thought... you’re good with computers, you could figure something out. Just – Gregg’s been _really_ upset, and I know band practice usually makes him feel better. And you’re my friend. And I want you to be part of the band. And I need your help.”

She should say no. As a matter of fact, there is no part of her that wants to say yes to this. But Angus is standing there, looking at her with this weird, pleading look in his eyes, like he’s asked her for something far more high-stakes than joining his and his boyfriend’s band, and it’s 10 in the freaking morning, and she desperately wants to light this cigarette.

“Fine,” says Bea. “Fine, fine. I’ll come.”

Turns out, it’s _super _easy to make your laptop play the drums and even bass at the same time. So easy, in fact, that Bea immediately remarks, “Why don’t we just scrap the whole band thing and make all our music on the computer? Bet it’d sound better.”

“You know, the point of playing in a band isn’t to sound good, it’s to have fun,” Gregg says cheerily, plugging his guitar in. “Just kidding! It’s to do both, and we already sound great.”

He saunters across the stage to sling his arm around Angus’ shoulders, planting an extremely loud kiss on his cheek. “Besides, if we did everything digitally, we wouldn’t get to hear Angus’ hauntingly beautiful voice.”

“I could just record my voice and put it into Bea’s program,” Angus points out, though he’s smiling.

“We’d be losing out on the magic of the live performance!” Gregg exclaims, grinning. “Doesn’t anyone appreciate _live performance _anymore?”

Bea fiddles idly with her laptop as the two of them squabble across the stage, glancing up every now and then to see Gregg bouncing around while Angus stands there, arms crossed, rolling his eyes occasionally but unable to keep the affectionate smile off his face.

She never liked Gregg when they were still in school. It wasn’t really his fault, though. Sure, he never grew out of that phase that most kids go through in kindergarten, where they have way more energy than they know what to do with, but that wasn’t it.

For the first time in half a year, Bea thinks of Mae.

She usually tries not to think about Mae, and so far she’s succeeded – but since she’s here, with the best friend that Mae abandoned her for all those years ago, getting ready to artificially play the instrument that Mae used to play, it’s hard not to think of her. Thinking of Mae always makes Bea quietly resentful, and she doesn’t like dwelling on resentment. It’s counterproductive.

Gregg calls over to her: “Hey, Bea, ready to go?”

Bea snaps out of it quickly, shakes off thoughts of Mae and college and a future that she’ll never have. “Yep. Let’s do this.”

The thing is, Bea cares. Obviously she does. Unfortunately she is human and humans have the capability to care, about people and places and things. Gregg is still chattering away when they clear up after that first practice but his shoulders slump a little when he glances at the stored-away drum kit on his way out and Angus’ grip on his hand tightens. Bea bets they think she doesn’t notice, but she notices.

She notices a lot every time she shows up to band practice. She’s not really sure why she agrees to keep going to them. Her dad is having more and more trouble getting up every day and she’s basically the only one keeping the Pickaxe afloat at this point. He’s never around anymore, but when people call in they always ask for him anyway, and sound surprised to hear her voice instead.

So, yeah. Bea doesn’t exactly need a weekly commitment in her life, especially one that matters so little, but on her way home one day she looks across the street and sees Gregg and Angus arguing outside the Snack Falcon, and Gregg angrily slapping away Angus’ hand as he reaches for him, and the hurt look on Angus’ face. She’s never seen him look that upset before.

She stays with the band. It feels so silly to call herself “part” of the band – Bea isn’t “part” of anything, that’s kind of her thing – especially when all she really does is press a button on her laptop. But it seems to make Gregg happy. Not that it’s especially hard to make that goober happy, she thinks.

Still. When Gregg is happy, Angus is happy, too.

After practice, they go to the diner. Going to the diner is as much a part of band practice as the actual band practice. The owner hates Gregg because Gregg always goes into the dumpster behind the diner and smashes their glass bottles in the alley and shit, so they have to order a lot to keep him from banning them.

They always sit in the same booth. Sometimes Germ will be there, or maybe Jackie will drop in once in a while and make Gregg feel “profoundly uncool” (his words), but mostly it’s just the three of them. Angus and Gregg and Bea, also. She’s not always sure what she’s doing there. It’s fun, sure, but they’re Angus and Gregg, and she’s just Bea, off to the side.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s just… more she’d rather be doing than sitting around on a Friday night in a shitty diner with the most codependent couple she knows. Although whether she has the means to do those things remains to be seen.

Angus sees her fidgeting one day (he notices a lot, too) and says, “Wanna step out for a smoke?”

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Bea says later, shivering a little in the autumn chill.

“I don’t,” Angus says, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Just thought I’d keep you company.”

“Oh,” Bea says. “What about Gregg?”

“He’ll be fine,” Angus says. “He knows I’d never smoke.”

“Yeah?”

“I have asthma.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bea mumbles, cigarette between her teeth as she fumbles for her lighter. “Forgot. You always did cross country in high school.”

Angus huffs out a laugh. “I sucked at it.”

“Gee, wonder why,” Bea says, a wry smile coming across her face. Her fingers close around the lighter in her bag, and just before she takes it out she pauses, thinks about Angus and his asthma and secondhand smoke. “You can go back inside. Really.”

Angus shrugs, draws his scarf closer around the bottom of his face. “It’s cool.”

Bea looks at him and feels a pang of something like caring.

“Damn it,” she says. “Didn’t bring my lighter.”

“Oh,” Angus says. “We could see if the diner –”

“Nah, it’s okay,” Bea cuts in brusquely, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and popping it back into the box. “Let’s just go back inside.”

Bea knows that Angus and Gregg aren’t gonna stick around forever. They talk about it a lot, about how someday they’re going to move out of Possum Springs, to Bright Harbor or something, where they can actually see the sun and the sea and everything that makes you feel alive. Not like Possum Springs. There’s nothing for the two of them in Possum Springs. Nothing for anyone here.

She was resentful when Mae got to leave – a kind of resentment that she still can’t seem to let go of – but listening to Gregg yammer on about how he and Angus are going to decorate their apartment in Bright Harbor just makes Bea feel a little sad. By the expression that flickers across Angus’ face sometimes when the topic comes up, she thinks it makes him a little bit sad, too.

There’s a lot of things that she wants. Things that she can’t really articulate or make sense of but that nestle away stubbornly on the edge of her consciousness, always just out of reach. It’s just a sad, quiet yearning that she knows will never lead to anything real.

It sucks. God, it really sucks.

“You’d come visit us, right?” Gregg says one day, mouth full of pizza. “We could all go to the beach together. Or to wherever people like you hang out in Bright Harbor. Dark alleyways, maybe?”

Bea cracks a smile and shrugs nonchalantly. “Sure, as long as you pay for the gas money.”

That night she sits in her bedroom and puts her head in her hands and cries for the first time in months. She doesn’t know why.

Much, much later on, so far on that Bea can’t remember a time before she had the band but not so far on that she's forgotten how lonely she used to feel, Mae asks her: “How do you, like… get up every day, and go open the store, and keep doing it?”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Bea replies, voice so dry that it makes her sick.

This is her life, after all. This is what she has.


End file.
